Child_ had worked like drudges over those bottles....

Every bottle of liquor aboard had been requisitioned. The liquid had
been poured into plastic containers; only a few spoonfuls had been left
in each bottle.

Then lead, melted down and beaten into sheets, was wrapped around each
bottle, forming a thin and chinkless layer over all the glass but the
lip; and the lead was painted with tough plastikoid paint, which covered
it with a film one-twentieth of an inch thick. Caps of lead were made
for the bottles. At the end of a couple of hours, they had sixty-six
bottles, glass inside, lead covered, and topped off with plastikoid
which would conceal the presence of lead from any known test short of
X-ray.

Each of the eleven men carried six of these bottles, then, actually lead
containers, but apparently plastikoid; the lead stoppers were concealed
in joerg-hide bags. If the giant who had been beaten in the spaceship
was a criterion, the enemy would not recognize the presence of lead
until it actually touched them--and then, thought Pink, with a quick
prayer, it would be too late for them.

Beaming the radio to a distance of ten feet, he said, "Hey, Jerry, want
to lay a bet on who bags the first brute?"

"Sure. Twenty bucks says I get him. And don't call me Jerry," said the
sweet, quiet, and thoroughly startling voice of organicus officer Circe
Smith.

CHAPTER XVIII

I didn't have to do it, Pink thought. I could have changed the orders
when I saw that no giants were in sight. We could have blasted the one
on top of the _Elephant's Child_ and taken off and got out of range of
'em and gone back to Earth. We were free in that instant, when Daley
caught the alien and corked it up in the lead bottle with the liquor
that drew it. We shouldn't have come out here to the caves. We should
have left Oasis to itself.

He knew that he had squelched this idea before it was born, because he
had longed for a good fight; he recognized this alien life-form as
unclean, and he'd wanted to stamp it out, or make a dent in its numbers
anyway. So he'd gone ahead with the project, and now here was Circe,
risking her life to be with him, and if anything happened to her he'd
kill himself ... well, at least he'd mop up the giants who'd drawn him
here, he'd make a pogrom, a massacre to avenge her....

She isn't dead, boy, he told himself. She's just in danger. Don't get
distracted.

"Stick close," he told her shortly. "I'll whale